Who are Chelsea FC? (Part 3)
Two parts in to the series, Todd fired Graham Potter. Well you can't stop us that easily, Mr Boehly. This post-mortem looks at Chelsea's attackers and asks: "can we trust any of them next year?"
Some of you probably weren’t subscribers here when I started a series of articles talking about what to make of Chelsea during the post-January Potter period. Going from front-to-back, I covered Goalkeeper, Defence and Midfield before things turned wild.
Part 3 has taken a little while to write and honestly there’s a few reasons for that:
Todd Boehly, who seems to quite like a firing (despite press briefings to the opposite), fired Graham Potter and brought back club legend Frank Lampard to the club. That threw a bunch of things into question around what was going to happen with the attack.
“No but seriously, this has been horrible”, Frank Lampard (presumably) Chelsea’s attack ran cold for a lot of the year and it makes assessing them really quite hard. This team is goal-shy. 38 Premier League goals in 38 games. You don’t need a subscription to any Substack to tell you that goals are important for football matches and for Fantrax points. They’ve missed a lot of chances and confidence looks down across the board.
But… It’s not just about finishing. By a non-penalty xG metric, Chelsea should have 47 open-play goals. Managing to get to that would’ve got them a few more points (probably). But it’s also just not good in itself. They averaged around 58 npXG in the previous three seasons, which paired with a good defence was enough for Top 4 level. This year the defence has gone and the chance creation is mid-table. It’s a terrible combination.
And lastly, there’s just so many attacking players. And neither Potter or Lampard seemed really all that sure which ones are the best to use. Writing about attacking plans gets a lot harder when there doesn’t really seem to be much of one.
But we’ve reached the end of the season, and I think it is worth coming back to Part 3 now. And specifically I want to look at some of the main players that have lined up for Potter and Lampard and to try work out what has gone wrong and whether we should expect them to do anything for Fantrax next season.
The exclusions:
There are some names that I won’t be covering in depth here, for various reasons:
Joao Felix: Never set the world alight at Chelsea and at times seemed to be holding back his teammates with some fairly questionable decision making when passing the ball. Pochettino has reportedly judged him surplus to requirements so we are unlikely to see him in Blue again.
Christian Pulisic / Hakim Ziyech: Barring an unlikely Poch reprieve, these two have been out the door a long time. Neither really got the run of games they’d have hoped for to show they can contribute at Chelsea and the change of scene is needed.
Pierre Emerick Aubameyang: Technically still under contract but he has not got the legs for the Premier League anymore, so it seems almost a guarantee he will not be here next year.
David Datro Fofana: Seemingly a huge long-shot for playing time. Not enough of a sample to look at him in any depth. Surely a loan incoming.
Romelu Lukaku: As strange as it sounds, he could easily come back. But we don’t know where the relationship is between him and the club at this point, so will save speculation on his role for later in the Summer.
Christopher Nkunku: This one would all be about projecting production from another club / league, so we will handle that in any future signings deep-dives we write so this doesn’t become too long.
This puts us down to a core group of Kai Havertz, Raheem Sterling, Mason Mount, Mykhailo Mudryk, Noni Madueke and Armando Broja.
1: Kai Havertz
It’s hard to know what to make of Havertz. He’s been in the game for 3 seasons at this point, yet has never topped 7.5 points per game in a season. Even if he hadn’t been struck by the finishing struggles that also seemed to plague the rest of the squad, his xFpts were not a huge amount better (9.91, good enough for 66th overall). His ADP has somehow remained in the 2nd to 3rd round range every season to date.
It won’t be next year. And honestly, it’s very hard to see why it should be. He’s not ever looked truly comfortable as a 9 for Chelsea for Tuchel / Potter, nor as a winger or an 8 for Lampard. He’s been Chelsea’s best option at the position, but at this point that seems to speak a lot more to the quality of other options than it is an endorsement of Havertz as a lone striker.
The only optimism comes from the tiny sample size of games just prior to his departure where Potter played Havertz just off Sterling (Dortmund) and Mudryk (Leicester) as a 10 and he looked better with the space that provided him. Overall though, I don’t see a huge path to upside here unless his role significantly changes. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if Chelsea turn away from Havertz next year, with Nkunku and potentially another forward coming in and rumoured interest from Real Madrid. But if he stays, it feels like last chance saloon for Fantrax value.
Where could he have ADP value next year: 7th round onwards.
2. Raheem Sterling
If it’s hard to make a case for being interested in Havertz next season for Fantrax, it’s a little easier for Sterling. This year was objectively not great for him, but this was only the second time in the last 10 seasons that he’s finished below double figures in Fantrax points per game. And he was still occasionally effective for Chelsea, despite the dysfunction around him.
Keeping this one relatively short to say that Sterling has potential to bounce back if the attacking unit as a whole can show signs of life. He really needs better service into the box, which Chelsea have typically relied on Ben Chilwell and Reece James to provide. But overall, Chelsea have a lot invested in Sterling in terms of transfer fee and wages, he remains one of the few proven difference-makers, and it’s in their best interest to try to have him succeed at Stamford Bridge.
Where could he have ADP value next year? Late 3rd round / early 4th round onwards.
3. Mason Mount
Hard to look at the way Mason Mount’s year at Chelsea to be anything short of a disaster for all involved. Challenges around form, injuries, contracts offered, accepted and then revoked. If any player summed up Chelsea’s struggles in a microcosm, it was Mason Mount. He went from consecutive top-20 xFpt and top-12 WAR finishes to being fairly mediocre on both counts.
The hard part with Mason is that it’s possible he’s not even at Chelsea next season with the challenges around contract and links to Manchester United really heating up. But it’s hard to imagine that his new manager wouldn’t want Mason Mount available for selection when he lines up his first game of the season next year. And the early reports are that his new manager does want him to stay if there is any chance of bridges being repaired.
Given his age and his successes in previous seasons, I would be pretty bullish on Mount if he remains at Chelsea (and cautiously optimistic elsewhere if the landing spot is right) and think he represents a real chance to get value in next season’s drafts if his ADP is depressed.
Where could he have ADP value next year? 3rd round onwards.
4. Mykhailo Mudryk
The defining winter-transfer-saga of 2023 saw Mudryk decide to move to Chelsea after they one-upped Arsenal’s transfer offer for the winger. It isn’t unfair to categorise the results following the move as “meh”. And to a certain degree, this was probably a little predictable, looking at the fact he was coming from a smaller league where he’d put up only a small number of appearances. Statsbomb tweeted out the following radar ahead of his move, highlighting that there’s a few quirks that you’d expect he’d need to work out to truly succeed in the Premier League:
And sure enough, Mudryk has not been the instant hit that many, unfamiliar with him prior to January, might’ve expected with the price tag. Chelsea would argue he was bought as “one for the future” as comfort but for Fantrax he was probably someone who a lot of FAAB was spent on in January, only to output 6 starts and a negative WAR score (-0.128). There just wasn’t a lot to be excited by in his Fantrax profile. No goals, no assists, not many shots, not many key passes, not even many dribbles.
I suspect that he might be in need of a loan to a top 5 league club where he can play every week to develop and refine his game, given his competition at Chelsea. However, on the off chance he takes big leaps forward, he does have some speculative value. But we are talking late round dart throw territory here really.
Where could he have ADP value next year? 11th round onwards.
5. Noni Madueke
In amongst all of the questionable business, Chelsea do seem to have picked up a small number of pieces for the future (Badiashile, Fofana, Enzo) who I’m more confident predicting for success than Mudryk even after just a small number of games. And it’s not impossible that Noni Madueke should be considered in that group, at least as far as Fantrax is concerned.
In real life terms, there’s still a lot of rawness in Madueke’s game. In particular, he doesn’t get his pass off consistently enough when he’s attacking the box and that is probably the biggest thing holding him back from being a real threat down the right hand side for Chelsea. But what he does do is get a huge volume of attacks down that side. His successful take on numbers are very healthy and he does get a reasonable number of key passes. It props up his Fantrax numbers enough that if he’s starting, he probably should be on a roster.
I suspect his biggest challenge is going to be consistent minutes, as Chelsea will not have as much pressure to rotate next season without European games to manage. But there’s something here that a good youth-development-minded coach might look at and think is worth unlocking. Like Mudryk, he might be one of the names to watch in the late rounds but, unlike Mudryk, he comes with some in-built confidence that he at least had streaming value when he played this year.
Where could he have ADP value next year? 9th round onwards.
6. Armando Broja
Now we’re into some interesting waters. Broja is an fairly raw, fairly athletically gifted young man, with a Premier League season of minutes under the belt at Southampton where he showed occasional flashes of his ability. This won’t be a particularly long blurb, because so much of his value depends on how quickly he can return from the injury he sustained and whether Chelsea sign a premium striker to play ahead of him.
Opportunity is King in Fantrax, though. And with the current squad composition, Broja is the wild-card option to get minutes at the number 9 spot. That is potentially valuable, even for Chelsea. If we were drafting today, I think I’d be picking up a lot of Broja in Round 15, just in case. As there’s a whole transfer window left to go though, it’s hard to imagine his path to the pitch not getting more complicated between now and the first game of the season.
Where could he have ADP value next year? Realistically, he should probably go undrafted. But you should absolutely be keeping an eye here.
So with that, we close down this series looking at 2022/23’s official basket-case club of the year: Chelsea FC. There’ll likely be more to write about them over the Summer, as it looks as though Todd may not be done with his spending spree behaviour. But for now, I am considering myself in dire need of a Chelsea detox.
We’ve got more to come over the next few weeks, including more details of our official products for the 23/24 Fantrax season (it’s never too early to start planning, after all) so if you’re not already subscribed, hit the button below and make sure you don’t miss out on anything!